


Dyed in Red

by rollingdays



Category: Arashi (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Anal Sex, Blood and Gore, Bloodplay, Comeplay, Enemies to Lovers, Explicit Sexual Content, Facials, Found Families, Jealousy, M/M, Masturbation, Murder, Past Abuse, Polyamory, Rough Sex, Threesome - M/M/M, Voyeurism, i mean not really but just in case
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-16 00:15:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16074365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rollingdays/pseuds/rollingdays
Summary: The first time was an accident. Every time after that was definitely on purpose.





	Dyed in Red

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE HEED THE TAGS. This fic contains extremely graphic content and major character death. If you are squeamish or do not want to read about those things, please don’t go any further. 
> 
> This took me years to write, and was very affectionately referred to as Murder Bros until about two seconds ago. A million thanks to my darlings K and R because they gave me a ridiculous amount of help and support and listened to me scream about this for literally two years, so without them this absolutely wouldn't exist. This is dedicated to both of them. Also thanks to T for the push in the right direction when I started to collapse under the weight of writing this mess. You helped pull this story out of the trash.
> 
> The title is a modified line from Truth ("Alone with a flower dyed in white").

Sho sighed as he used one finger to move his bangs out of his eyes, leaving a streak of blood across his forehead. He let his head fall back, rolling it along his neck and feeling the satisfying pop of the joints. He was getting tired, but there was still so much more fun to be had. 

The man on the floor writhed again, but his groan was significantly weaker than the screams of pain that had come before. It was amazing he was conscious enough to make any sounds or move at all. 

Sho looked down at him from his position sitting on his stomach, and pulled back his hand, bringing it down against the man's cheek in a strong punch. The man's head lolled to the side, and Sho was convinced he'd finally fallen unconscious, but then another moan of pain came from between his blood caked lips, and he raised his head up again, only to drop it back down against the hard cement floor, making the tarp underneath them rustle slightly. 

From his place hunched over on a chair in the corner, Nino laughed. It was a high, nasally laugh that Sho used to hate but now found endearing. "This one's fighting you, Sho-chan," Nino said, the grin on his face stretching from ear to ear. "It's been over an hour."

Sho didn't reply, just glanced back down at the man under him and flexed his fingers. His knuckles were cracked and splitting, and his entire arm was soaked in the mingled blood coming from both his hand and the stranger's face. Sho brought his arm back again and punched the guy in the head as hard as he could. There was a snap, and the man's head came to rest at an awkward angle. 

"Fuck," Sho groaned to himself, and Nino giggled again. 

Sho reached down, using his uninjured hand to move the man's head back and forth on his neck. There was no resistance, almost like the body was filled with sand instead of bones on joints. Sho had broken his neck. 

Fighting the tingling in his limbs from staying in the same position for so long, he pulled himself from his seat on the now-dead man's torso. While stretching his arms above his head, he glanced down at the body on the floor. 

They'd first brought this guy home nearly two hours ago. He'd been slow to come around after they’d doused him with chloroform, but he was quick to realize what was going on once he'd regained consciousness. He had done what they'd all done, going from door to door, trying to pull them open and gain the freedom that was taunting him from the other side, but the chains and locks Sho and Nino had put in place before had all held. They always held, and like all the men that had come before him, the dead man on the floor had begun to weep when he realized exactly who they were. 

From there the fun had started. 

It was Sho's turn, and Nino had been the one watching. Once Sho had gotten their newest conquest on the ground it had been easy, and he had focused most of his attention on the man's face. He had lasted a surprisingly long time, and Sho knew his hand was going to be swollen and bruised for his class the next day. He wasn't worried, he had medical tape he'd bought at a medical supply store for exactly these occasions, and Sho had gotten very good at lying over the last year.

 

 

The first time had been an accident in every sense of the word. 

Over a year earlier, Sho had gotten into a fight with his boyfriend and stormed out of their shared apartment, not pausing to calm down before getting in his car. He was driving furiously down a dark road in Tokyo, going well over the speed limit. It was just past two in the morning, and the city was surprisingly dark and quiet as the buildings whipped by outside the windows. 

He came around a corner in the heart of the city, and Sho heard a voice call faintly from outside just before a visibly intoxicated man stumbled into the street, waving his arms as if trying to wave down a taxi. The guy remained in the beam of Sho's headlights for barely more than a second before he was under the wheels of his car and then behind him. 

Sho hadn't had time to break, it had happened too fast. His hands had tightened on the steering wheel reflexively as he cringed, expecting the impact to damage his car, even for the man to fly through the windshield, but nothing so dramatic happened. It wasn’t like a movie, there was no gory explosion of blood and guts as he drove over the man, but he could feel the bones snapping under the weight of the wheels like dry twigs. He could have been imagining it, but he thought he could hear those bones breaking, the snapping echoing in his ears. It was a satisfying sound, like popping aural bubble wrap, like wood crackling in a bonfire. 

At first he felt nothing, it was as if he had been plunged into a lake so cold that even breathing became difficult. His mouth was open but closing it seemed impossible. His eyes began to sting and he realized he hadn’t blinked since the impact, but couldn’t even muster the force to close his eyelids. 

He made it halfway back to his apartment in stupefied silence before the realization of what he'd done slammed into him, a mirror of the impact earlier. 

It came all at once, one minute he was paralyzed with numbness and the next he was reeling with a combination of adrenaline and shock, exhaling in heavy, gasping breaths and trying to grip the steering wheel in his shaking hands hard enough to keep his car on the road. The fight from earlier had been completely erased from his mind. He drove the rest of the way home, alternating between stunned laughter and ragged panting like he had run several miles, never able to fully catch his breath. 

There'd been surprisingly little damage to his car, only a broken headlight and a small amount of blood sprayed over the hood, which he'd wiped up calmly before going back inside and breaking up with his boyfriend. He'd known the second he'd felt the crunch of the bones under his wheels that nothing his boyfriend offered him could ever live up to that.

In the days after, Sho felt a calm sense of peace, and the elation from the kill didn't leave him. He was unable to stop thinking about it, both during his next class he taught as a chemistry professor at the local university, and also at home. The imagined sound of the bones breaking followed him around everywhere, and a pleasured chill swept over him whenever he recalled the feeling of the man, a person with a life he knew nothing about and had very little interest in, being crushed under the wheels. 

When he saw the report of the hit and run on the news the next day, Sho was filled with jumpy excitement. Seeing the video of the now-cleaned stretch of highway where the accident had happened brought the impact fresh to his mind. He could feel the body under his car, the imagined wet splash as blood sprayed across the hood. He was breathing so heavily that he had to turn the volume up on the TV. 

The news reporter was going on and on about how sad the accident was, and Sho had shaken his head at the TV angrily. It wasn't sad at all, it had been eye-opening, exhilarating, life-changing. He frowned when the video moved from the shot of the highway to a newscaster at a desk, talking about the man Sho had run over. He wanted to see more of the highway, to submerge himself back in his memory longer. Instead, the news crew let the audience know there had been no cameras and there was virtually no evidence, and after one last appeal to the audience for information that might lead to an arrest, Sho turned off the TV. 

The next time was only a week later, and a bit different. Sho had enormously enjoyed the first kill, and minutes after it had happened, he knew he had to do it again. But it was mostly the bones breaking that had done it for him, and there were better, more intimate ways to experience that than using his car. Plus, a car was easily recognized. He'd gotten lucky the first time, he might not get lucky for the second. 

So he'd decided on a club, one that already had a reputation in town for being seedy and that didn't have security cameras outside. He wore his normal clothes, a baseball hat low over his eyes, but he carried a black plastic rain poncho he'd bought at a convenience store folded up in his pocket. He hadn't even gone inside the club, just walked to the alley in the back, calmly slipping the poncho over his head, and began to wait. 

It wasn't long before a man stumbled into the alley, clearly drunk, his steps weaving from side to side. Sho hid in the shadows, relieved that the first visitor was a man by himself instead of a group of the drunk women he'd seen walk past the alley several times. The man unzipped his fly, leaned one hand against the wall, and then Sho could hear the sound of his piss hitting the concrete. 

Sho waited for him to finish, and then he snuck up behind him. He was quick and strong, he'd played sports in high school and college despite being a science nerd and he had taken care of his body ever since, so pulling the man further into the dark alley, even if he was struggling, was no problem. 

Then Sho had pinned him on the ground and beaten him to death with his fists. 

It was better than the car. Much better. Feeling the nose, the jaw, the cheekbones all break under his hands was exactly what he'd needed. When he was done he had been startled to realize the front of his jeans were wet. He’d come in his pants.

He'd pulled the poncho over his head and balled it up, ditching it in a dumpster several blocks from the club. 

The next day the murder hadn't even made the news. Sho had searched online and found it tucked away in a local newspaper, dismissed as a victim of a drug dispute. The change in coverage made him feel nothing but relief that he would have the opportunity to do it again. 

The third time was a bit more dangerous. He'd picked up a drunk man at the club, brought him to a hotel room, and destroyed him. That time, the press was much more extensive, there had been news reports on every channel that had lasted for weeks before fading, and it had startled Sho enough that he'd decided never to do something as public as visiting a hotel with a victim again.

The fourth time was when he found what he thought of as "the space." With minimal googling, he was able to find a secluded and abandoned industrial park located only a half an hour's drive from his apartment. The place was enormous and had been out of commission for nearly fifteen years. Sho had his pick of ten different buildings, and the one he settled on was one of the smaller ones; it would be easier to control and to clean, and also it was located in the back of the compound, so anyone driving by would miss his car parked out front. 

There were rusted locks on the doors, and breaking into the building had been easy. It was filthy inside; everything was coated in practically three feet of dust, and abandoned scrap metal and tarps and miscellaneous things left behind by the workers years before were littered across the floor. But after some exploring, he discovered that there was a working shower, and after throwing a light switch without much hope, was amazed to see that the power was still on. Occasionally utilities would be left on in old construction zones like this to keep things from building up or freezing during winter and exploding, but Sho was still amazed at his luck. 

In addition to the running water and electricity, there was a lofted alcove, large enough to make into a living space if he wanted, and a metal ladder that luckily hadn’t rusted. It was perfect. 

He spent the night in his car outside the building, waiting to see if there were any security guards being paid to make checks, but there was no one. 

He came back the next day and spent a few hours cleaning the space, picked up a couch from a second-hand shop, and boarded up the windows on the lower floor. He didn’t think anyone would be able to get out of the thick panes of glass that were already there, but he didn’t want to risk it, nor risk someone seeing light coming from a supposedly abandoned industrial area.

He had also brought a baseball bat from his stint on the high school baseball team, a heavy metal mallet, and a golf club with him, and made a stop at a hardware store to buy little metal U-hooks, which he drilled into the wall. Each of the tools fit snugly into them, creating a simple arsenal that was easily accessible. At the same hardware store he purchased heavy duty chains and locks with which he'd secured each door from the outside. All the locks had the same key that he wore on a chain around his neck.

The next day he went to a different, seedier club than he'd visited the week before. It was easy to stake a man out, charm him, drug him, then carry him to his car as if he was a boyfriend who had just had too much to drink. The ride to the space was the hardest part, and Sho tried to keep himself calm despite the anxiety coursing through his body. 

That time was the first time he really experimented. When the man had first woken up, he was disoriented, confused, then angry. He'd come at Sho aggressively, demanding to know where he was and what was going on, and that's when Sho had hit him over the head with the baseball bat. It was a hard hit and it sent the man to his knees, but he was on his way back to his feet when Sho took out his kneecaps. He played around, trying to figure out which methods would be best for which bones, what tool made what sound when it hit each body part, what each instrument felt like in his hands as it hit something as solid as a skull with full force. 

By the time Sho was tired out, the man on the ground was unrecognizable as a human being. Blood was everywhere, and it took Sho nearly six hours to clean up all of it. When he was done, he'd pulled an oil drum he'd purchased from the hardware store into the center of the floor, and used a bit of the few pounds of lye he'd stolen from his university chem lab mixed with water to dissolve the body.

It was a long, disgusting process, but Sho found it worth the trouble. 

The fifth time was near-identical to the fourth, but the sixth time, nearly six months since the hit and run, was the first time things went wrong. He had moved around town, picking different spots to drug and kidnap unsuspecting, single men at the grimier clubs in the area. The sixth time, the bartender at one of the clubs recognized him when he came over to take his drink order. 

Sho left the place immediately, panting and full of tension that he needed to work out. In a panic, he hurried through the spring rain back to the first club. He bought a new poncho from the same convenience store, and frantically tore the plastic open on the package as he nearly ran down the street through the downpour. When he turned the corner of the alley, he stopped in his tracks.

There were what looked like two men already inside the cramped space, half hidden from the weak light of the street lamps in the shadows thrown by the narrow walls. One was holding the other tight in an embrace, and neither man moved at the sound of Sho's footsteps pattering against the ground. 

Embarrassed at interrupting strangers during an intimate moment and frustrated because he'd have to find a new spot, he was halfway through apologizing when the man facing away from him began to move. 

He brought his arm back in a quick, smooth movement, there was a wet squelching sound, and the light from a streetlamp caught a glint of metal in the man's hand. Sho instantly realized it was a knife, and that it was covered in blood. The second man collapsed on the ground further in the alley, the dark shape of his body unmoving. 

The man who was still standing lolled his head around to gaze at Sho. He was still mostly in the darkness, but Sho could see he was relatively small, shorter than himself by a few inches and with a thin build. He had dark hair, his bangs hung over his pale face, covering his eyes. He was dressed in baggy clothes that hung on his frame like a giant deflated balloon.

He looked at Sho, as unmoving as the body collapsed at his feet. The knife was in his hand, and fat drops of blood were dripping off the tip to splash down into the growing red puddle at his feet. 

Sho was entranced. 

The chances of catching someone else, someone like him, in the same alley he had been hoping to use himself seemed astronomically small, until Sho remembered where exactly he was. It was the most sordid club in town, the only one with a poorly-lit alley and no security cameras. It was the only place Sho hadn't had to resort to using a ruse and actually enter a club, the only place where it had been astoundingly easy to commit murder outside of his safe space he'd created for himself back at the warehouse. With the rain, the foot traffic in the area was greatly reduced for the night. 

If all that was taken into account, it didn't seem so crazy to wind up face to face with a man who apparently just stabbed someone to death.

Sho swallowed, a loud gulp that seemed to echo throughout the alleyway. The sound embarrassed him, and he worried that the man in front of him had taken the sound as a sign of fear. He exhaled, then gave his most winning “I’m someone to be respected” smile that he usually used on his students on the first day of class. 

"Hi," he said, hoping that he sounded confident, and that none of his nervous excitement was showing through. 

The man in front of him didn't move beyond lifting his head so it was no longer lolled backwards on his neck. He stared at Sho, making no other sounds beyond his even, calm breathing. 

"It looks like you did some nice work there." Sho pointed to the guy on the floor. His blood was being washed further down the alley in the rain, and pretty soon it would reach the tips of Sho's shoes. He had to suppress the urge to crouch down and run his fingers through it.

There was a long pause, and Sho was about to start talking again when the guy in front of him suddenly turned his body and took a step forward, so he was mostly out of the shadows. He had a surprisingly cute face with a skinny nose, a mole on his chin. Blood dotted one of his cheeks, probably from the spray when he had hit an artery. The guy licked his lips, apparently not afraid of tasting a stranger's blood, and Sho felt his smile relax from his professional one into something more natural. 

The man seemed to consider him for a long time before he used his head to flick the wet bangs out of his eyes. "You're not scared?" he asked. 

"Scared? No way. I came here for the same reason, actually. I don't use a knife or anything, but... Isn't it incredible that I ran into you? What are the odds!" He took a step forward and was delighted when the man didn't move away from him. "I'm Sho," he said, extending out a hand for a handshake. 

The stranger glanced at Sho's hand but completely ignored it. "Nino," he said, squinting through the rain at him.

"Nino? Is that a nickname?" Sho said.

Nino didn’t answer. The sound of clicking high heels against the sidewalk accompanied by five or six different voices laughing loudly and conversing began to echo down the block towards them. A group of women were headed their way. 

Nino was fast, almost incredibly fast. He slid the body on the ground backwards, using his feet to nudge it far enough so it was deep in the shadows. Then he smoothly slid further into the alley, until he had vanished from view. Sho almost forgot to hide himself, because he was so impressed by the calm, methodical way Nino had moved. He darted into the darkness at the last second, crouching down behind a dumpster as the group of women passed by them. None of them glanced their way.

“Well, we should probably move somewhere safer to talk,” Sho said, once the sounds of the voices had faded into nothingness. 

“Why?”

Sho squinted into the dark, trying to see where Nino was hiding. “Because, I, for one, don’t really want to get caught chatting here. I have a safe pla-”

“No, why do you think I want to talk to you?”

Sho paused, his mouth slightly open. “I just… I mean, how often do you think this happens? Two people like us running into each other? Don’t you think we should at least chat for a while?”

Nino stepped forward and Sho jumped. He had been talking towards a shape three feet to Nino’s left, and he cursed in his head. Nino was small, but he was fast, and good at hiding, and Sho felt his chest throb with how badly he wanted to talk to the man, to pick his brain apart and share tips, to make a friend.

Nino was scowling at him. “A chat? You think we should chat?”

“Well, yeah,” Sho used one fingertip to rub at his bottom lip nervously. “Look, I have this great space, I should show it to you.”

“Fine,” Nino said, and despite the fact that he rolled his eyes when he said it, Sho felt a wave of relief and excitement wash over him. 

But then Nino walked right past him and headed boldly towards the street.

“Wait,” Sho said, jogging forward quickly and reaching out to place his hand on Nino’s shoulder, stopping him from walking out of the alley. He felt his thumb swipe against the skin of Nino’s neck, and then the world was a blur.

Nino was small but he was strong, and he moved so fast that Sho didn’t processing it happening until it was over. One second he was facing Nino, his hand where he’d placed it on his shoulder, and the next he was pinned against the wall, the giant knife Nino had used earlier stabbed into the mortar between the bricks, right next to his head and glinting in the light from the streetlamp. Nino’s face was inches from his own, nearly panting in anger. 

“Don’t fucking touch me,” he said, his eyes shining in the dark. 

Sho’s mouth was still open from the shock of being slammed against the wall with such speed, and he raised his hands in mock surrender. “Whoa, okay! You got it! I just… you’re covered in blood!” 

Nino’s eyebrows knitted together in a frown. He glanced down at himself. “So?”

“So, do you want to have people call the cops on you? You can’t just walk around covered in blood in the middle of Tokyo. Here-” he wiggled out from Nino’s body caging him in, careful not to let even his clothes brush up against Nino’s. He pulled the poncho up over his head. “You can wear this. I was going to use it myself, but you can have it. And it’s raining tonight, so you won’t even get any weird looks.”

Nino stared at the black plastic. 

“Why are you so…” Nino frowned, looking around the alley as if the word he was searching for would be written on the brick wall, “... enthusiastic?”

Sho frowned. “What do you mean?”

 

And so Nino had joined him. 

They made an odd pair, Sho and his suits and teaching job, Nino and his oversized hoodies and harsh words. 

As for the murders, Sho didn't know what Nino got out of them. He had tried to talk to him several times without success, and was only ignored or shot a cold look when he got around to the personal questions. 

The only time he got any sort of information about Nino’s past was the day he showed up with the suitcase. 

Sho had gone to work, and when he came back, he unlocked the door to find Nino sitting on the floor - and surrounded by stacks of cash. 

Sho had stopped dead in his tracks. There was money everywhere, spilling out of the biggest suitcase he had ever seen in his life. Nino looked up unflinchingly at Sho standing in the doorway, as if it was completely normal to have thousands upon thousands of yen scattered around him. 

“What is all this?” Sho asked. He had a hard time getting his mouth to stay closed. 

“Money,” Nino said, frowning up at him before going back to counting. 

Sho watched him, and realized he was stacking bills in piles of a hundred thousand yen. There was even more scattered across their floor than he had first realized. 

“Yes, it’s money,” Sho said slowly, “but where did it come from?”

Nino pointed at the suitcase, and Sho was about to tear his hair out. He felt like the world had been dipped in honey, and everything was moving very slowly. 

“And where did the suitcase come from?”

“I buried it in the woods before. I went to get it back today.”

“What?” The image of Nino burying things in the woods wasn’t that strange, but the idea of him burying a suitcase full of money? That wouldn’t compute in Sho’s mind. “How did you get back here?”

“Hitched to the highway, and then walked.”

Sho took a heavy seat on the ground next to Nino. The pile of bills closest to where his butt had landed slid sideways across the floor. Sho’s hands moved automatically to right them. 

“Where did all this come from?” Nino was halfway to pointing to the suitcase again, but Sho cut him off. “Before the suitcase, I mean.”

Nino rolled his eyes, annoyed at the incessant questions, but Sho didn’t care. He had never seen anywhere near the amount of money that was on the floor, and that made him nervous. 

Nino sighed heavily, as if saying more than three words was going to cause him physical pain. “I used to work at a hotel,” he said, and still his hands moved, making small piles of bills. “Lots of rich people stayed there. They left money everywhere. I cleaned the rooms, and sometimes I’d take some.”

“And that led to-” Sho motioned around the floor, and Nino nodded. 

“It took a while, but I saved what I took with my cashed paychecks. First under my mattress at the other hotel where I lived, and then I bought a suitcase. The suitcase made it easier.”

Sho whistled through his teeth. “You don’t work there anymore, right? Why’d you leave?”

Nino’s hands stopped for the first time since Sho had walked through the door. He looked sideways at Sho, and seemed on the verge of smiling. “I walked in on a murder scene. It was an accident, but I went in to clean a room, and there was this guy on the bed. His guts were everywhere.” Nino’s face was distant, dreamy. “I closed the door and stayed in the room for a bit, just looking. I called the front desk after a while, I had to, but it was nice, looking. The news crews came, I left work, buried the suitcase in the woods, then I ran into you a bit later. I just… never went back to work.”

“Wait,” Sho said, but before asking, he already knew. “What was the name of the hotel you worked at?”

“The Overlook.”

Sho laughed. “That was me,” he said, grinning wildly. “I did the guy you found. He was my third. What a small world.” 

Nino said nothing, but returned to counting bills, his small hands working methodically. Sho joined in, and when they were done Sho counted them. There was just under three million yen in all. 

The money went back into the suitcase, and the suitcase went up on the loft. They used it for ordering food, for buying a nice, huge futon, and for stocking the warehouse with necessities. Sho was touched to come home one day to the only gift Nino ever bought him, a set of heavy iron restraints that he had somehow purchased and then drilled into the floor, which Nino would not acknowledge when Sho tried to thank him.

Days, weeks, then months passed. Sho found himself spending more time at the warehouse with Nino than at his own apartment. He offered several times to bring Nino back to his place and let him sleep on the couch or in the bed instead of a futon on the loft floor, but he refused the offer every time. After a while, Sho started staying the night, sharing the futon and sleeping next to Nino. He’d offered to buy a second one, with his own money, even, and Nino had refused that, too. 

They grew closer, more comfortable, and they came up with a schedule: one body every two weeks, Nino and Sho alternating weeks. No more clubs, they took who they could find on the street. They both helped clean up and dispose of the bodies, or what little of them was left after it was over. 

Nino began to enjoy talking to Sho, but still wouldn’t talk about his past. He’d fall silent the second Sho asked a probing question, so over time, Sho just gave up asking. Besides, he would remind himself, Nino’s past didn’t matter, and nothing could technically be worse than murder for fun. 

Even as time passed Nino still wouldn’t let Sho touch him, but that didn’t mean he and Nino never got physical. 

A short time after Sho had started staying overnight in the warehouse and sharing the same futon with Nino, Sho had woken up in the middle of the night to find Nino next to him, thrusting into his own hand and biting down hard onto his arm to muffle the quiet whining sounds he was making. They'd jerked off together, and afterwards, to Sho’s surprise, Nino had scooted backwards on the futon and pushed his back against Sho’s front. Making sure he didn’t come into contact with Nino’s skin, Sho had snaked an arm around Nino’s middle, and they had fallen asleep cuddled together. 

Such evenings became a staple to their unusual relationship. Sho was careful to let Nino initiate, and never to touch him. It was much different than the sexual encounters that Sho had been used to with his other partners, but it was much more satisfying, more comfortable. He enjoyed taking care of Nino, in whatever form that may be. 

 

But things didn’t stay the same forever. 

 

Nino had been the one to find Jun in the dumpster. 

It was a not-quite-freezing night in October, seven months since Nino had joined Sho, and the torrential downpour outside had forced them into a vicious game of janken to determine who would be the unlucky one to step outside to take out the trash. Nino had lost, and had been vocal about his displeasure, but he'd gone out into the rain with a full garbage bag in each hand just the same. 

When he didn't come back in five minutes, Sho had started to worry. Five minutes was a long time for Nino to be outside even in the best of weather, and in a storm five minutes might as well have been hours. Sho quickly threw his jacket on, put up the hood, and ran out the door, trying to calm the flare of panic building in his chest. He found Nino standing in front of the dumpster, the lid thrown open and the bags of trash at his feet. He was completely soaked; Nino's jacket didn't have a hood, unlike Sho's, and Sho felt a twinge of guilt over forcing him outside earlier. 

He joined Nino, fully intending on asking if he was okay, when Sho saw the unconscious man lying on top of the trash inside the giant metal container in front of them. He was in a T-shirt and jeans, his feet bare. There was blood, and a lot of it, coloring the front of the man's T-shirt from various injuries to his head and face. With the amount of blood Sho would have guessed the guy was already dead, but even through all the rain, Sho could see he was shaking violently. 

Sho glanced at Nino and didn't like what he saw. Nino was staring at the man like a kid would look at an injured puppy, and dread began to replace the panic Sho had felt in his chest earlier. If Nino hadn't shooed him away or already killed the guy himself, it meant trouble. 

Sho waited, not quite wanting to be the one to break the silence that stretched between them. With one particularly violent tremor, the man in the dumpster hit his head on the wall of the bin and a loud metallic bang echoed in the night, sounding eerily like thunder amidst the downpour. After a few minutes, Nino tore his gaze from the man lying in the trash to look at Sho. 

"He needs help," Nino said distantly, then turned his eyes back to the front again. 

"Yeah," Sho said, "but not necessarily from us."

Nino whipped his head back around, and glared at Sho. Rain was streaming down his face, and his hair was plastered against his head as if he'd just climbed out of a swimming pool. "He has no one else. It has to be us."

Sho rolled his eyes. "Nino, you don't know-"

"Come on, help me." Nino moved forward and tried to reach up into the dumpster to grab the shoulders of the man inside, but he wasn't tall enough. He struggled for a few seconds, trying to balance on his toes to gain the extra inches needed, but it was futile. Sho watched him struggling, then sighed. 

"Alright," he said, stepping forward next to Nino. "I've got this end, you get his feet when I've got him mostly out."

Nino hurried to the other side of the bin, and nervously bounced from foot to foot, a serious and determined look on his face. Sho was able to reach inside the bin much easier than Nino had, but pulling a man out of a chest-high container who was about the same size as himself, and dead weight at that, was a different story. It was rough work with the rain making the ground slippery, but after a few attempts he was able to maneuver the body so half of him was close enough to the edge for Nino to grab both his calves. Together they were able to pull the body over the side, and with Sho supporting his upper half and Nino with the lower, they began to walk. 

It took a few minutes to get the unconscious man inside, and they hurried to set him down on the couch, leaving a thick trail of water behind them as they moved.

He was gorgeous, and his beauty was only heightened by the smears of blood and scrapes and cuts littering his face. Sho bit his lip, getting down on his knees to get closer to the guy’s face, considering. He suddenly wanted to hit the handsome cheekbones of the stranger with his mallet. Very much. So much that he felt it threading under his skin and making him feel jumpy with pent up energy. 

He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could so much as get a word out, the request was cut short with a stern look and a decisive, "Stop it, we're keeping him," from Nino. 

"Keeping him?" Sho scoffed as he stood. "Nino, he's not a dog. We can't just take someone in, here of all places, and-" 

"If we didn't, he would have died."

"So?" Sho stood and threw his hands up in the air in frustration. "Do you remember what this place is? What we do here? We can't just bring someone in, and-"

"And we would have been fucked if he died out there, anyway," Nino said softly from his place sitting on the armchair of the couch, running his hands through the stranger's hair. "We would have had to get rid of his body, when he wasn't even ours to clean up." 

He let his hand wander down and began to play with the fingers of one of the man's hands that had ended up on his chest. Sho’s mouth fell open. 

Nino was touching someone, actual skin to skin contact.

Sho’s stomach twisted violently, a foamy, fizzy feeling building up inside of him. He felt like a can of soda that had been shaken, ready to explode, but he didn’t get why seeing Nino’s small fingers entwined with the man’s longer ones made him feel that way. 

"He's young, I'm sure someone's looking for him." The sound of Nino’s voice distracted him a little, and some of the fizzy feeling evaporated. Some, but not all. 

Sho dragged his hands down the front of his face and let out a shaky breath. "Okay," he said, puffing his cheeks out as he thought. "Okay. So he's here. What do you want to do now?" Nino slid his hand against the unconscious man's, as if comparing their sizes. The stranger’s hand easily dwarfed Nino's, but it was skinny and delicate where Nino's was calloused and thick. "Nino?"

Nino gently placed the other's hand back on his chest, palm down. The guy had mostly stopped shivering, but he was still soaked. "Let's get him out of his clothes." 

Sho frowned. "Are you nuts? If this dude wakes up to us stripping him naked he's going to get the wrong idea."

Nino turned to face Sho for the first time since they'd been outside. "And if he stays in sopping wet clothes he'll get sick. I have some extra clothes I was intending to wear the next time. They'll be small on him but they'll work."

"Fine," Sho said, walking out of the room, "but you're the one who's going to undress him."

 

When Sho came back into the open room of the warehouse, he found Nino leaning over the couch, supporting himself with one hand on the backrest and cleaning their guest’s face gently with a wet washcloth with the other. 

"His name's Jun," Nino called, without looking away from what he was doing. "I found his wallet in his jeans. Matsumoto Jun." 

Sho made a noncommittal noise somewhere between a hum and a grunt. He didn't care about the guy's name, he wanted him gone. 

He walked to the tiny fridge they'd pooled money together to buy sometime last year. They'd placed it in a makeshift kitchen area in an empty closet. Sho opened the freezer and began to root around inside. There was a carton of ice cream in there somewhere, and Sho intended to treat himself. With the way the night was going, he deserved it. He reached his hand in and began moving things around.

He was not jealous. He knew that’s how it was coming off, but he really wasn’t. Sho knew he and Nino had a very special relationship that was not going to be replaced or altered in one night by some guy they found on the street. It was just irritating, watching Nino carefully dab at the cuts across some stranger’s face when Sho had been looking forward to Nino putting the cuts on someone himself this week. This was a new side of him, and Sho was also irritated that he'd never seen this part of Nino before. He'd cut himself, even sprained and broken bones, and Nino had never even batted an eyelash. He'd laughed, even. 

Sho gave up on his search for the ice cream and slammed the freezer shut. "I'm going to take a nap," he said, and walked back out of the room. 

 

It took Jun almost twenty-four hours to come around. Nino had refused to leave him, and Sho didn't want to leave the two of them alone for reasons he wasn't quite ready to explore yet, so he'd called in sick to the university. He had gone to sleep alone on the futon spread out on the floor of the loft, and had woken up alone. A tiny part of him had been hoping Nino would at least come to bed, but he refused to let himself feel disappointed about Nino’s absence. 

He'd climbed down the ladder, taken a piss and brushed his teeth, and then found Nino curled up at the foot of the couch with his head pillowed on his arms on top of one of the seat cushions. The unconscious man's - Jun's - hand was resting a few inches from Nino's own, and the thought of the two of them holding hands hit Sho in the chest like a punch. It was too much, too much was changing too quickly, and he exhaled sharply, turning on his heels, suddenly needing the distraction of coffee.

Nino woke up a short time later, and Sho could hear him tending to Jun from his seat in the kitchen alcove. 

They spent the vast majority of the day avoiding each other, or rather, Sho spent the vast majority of the day avoiding Nino, because Nino didn't actually move. He stayed with Jun, tipping water into his mouth, pressing his hand against his forehead to take his temperature, fluffing the blankets and pillows and generally being as fussy as any mother would be over her dangerously ill child. 

Sho couldn't stand to watch it, and he spent most of his day lying up in the loft, reading through papers he had to grade. That ate up a lot of time, and when Sho finally started to squint in the fading light of the sunset, he looked up. He'd gotten through most of them and was satisfied with his work day, even if he'd played hooky for the first time in his life to spy on what he assumed was the budding of a possibly catastrophic relationship out of concern, and okay, maybe a little bit of jealousy. 

Sho was about to place a dinner order for pick up at a pizza place when Nino came sprinting over to the loft. 

"He's waking up," he said, grasping the rungs of the ladder. 

Sho looked at his phone in his hand, taking special care to make sure his facial expression seemed very disinterested. 

"Are you coming down?" Nino asked, and Sho was relieved to see he sounded a bit anxious about the answer. After scrolling a few times through a menu that he'd already practically memorized, he sighed and tossed his phone down onto the futon. 

When they made it back to the couch, Jun was frowning with his eyes closed, rubbing at one of them with the back of his hand. 

"Hi," Nino said softly, as if speaking too loud would shatter thin ice under his feet. At the sound of his voice, the man on the couch jumped, and sat up quickly, only to groan and clutch his head before letting his body fall back down to the cushions. Nino rushed forward to grip his shoulder gently, as if trying to steady him even though he was already lying down again. 

"I wouldn't move around a lot," Nino said. "We did what we could for you here, but you've still got a fever."

Anger suddenly enveloped Sho at Nino verbally including him in the efforts to save the man who was still on his couch. His couch. He hadn't done anything, he'd wanted the guy gone, and he still did. He scowled and was about to head back to the loft again, but Nino stood and motioned towards him. 

"I'm Nino, and this is Sho-chan," Nino said, glancing up at Sho hopefully. Sho felt a little of his anger soften. 

"Matsumoto Jun," the guy on the couch said, turning to squint at them. 

"We know, we found your license in your jeans. Your clothes were soaked from the rain, so I changed you into some of mine. Not for any weird reason," Nino added hastily, "you were just, you know, sick."

Jun nodded. "Thank you." He rubbed at his face again, then held his fingers in front of his face, squinting to bring them into focus. "I can't see..."

Sho frowned. "What, are you blind?"

Jun turned and squinted harder, trying to locate which of them had spoken to him. "My glasses, I need my glasses..."

"You didn't have any on you when we found you," Nino said.

"Found me?" Jun frowned. "What do you mean 'found me?' Where exactly am I?"

"You're, uh," Nino glanced at Sho nervously, openly hoping for him to step in and take over. Sho was better at this kind of thing, he was more creative in terms of keeping their secrets actually secret. Sho, however, helpfully focused his gaze somewhere above Nino's shoulder, refusing to meet his eyes. Finally, after a long and awkward pause, Nino settled on, "You're in a warehouse off of I-95. We don't exactly live here but we spend a lot of time here, and you were in our dumpster."

Jun frowned, and brought his hand up to scratch at his cheek where a long and thin cut had started to heal. He winced in pain when his nails made contact with his skin. "What's wrong with my face?" 

“When we found you,” Sho frowned at Nino including him unwillingly again, “you were in rough shape. You’ve got some cuts, some bruising. Do you remember what happened?”

“The last thing I remember is being home, and I… I was-” Jun stilled, his gaze unfocused and his mouth still half-open, as if he had suddenly remembered something.

“What’s wrong?” Nino asked, and Sho rolled his eyes at the concern he could hear in his voice. 

“Nothing, I just…” Jun ruffled his hair with one hand. All of a sudden, he seemed embarrassed. “I just realized I don’t really have a place to go.”

“You can stay here, we don’t-”

“No.”

Nino turned to him, and for the first time since the stranger had entered their lives, he looked angry. “But, Sho, if we-”

“No. I’ve had enough of this, Nino. You know he can’t stay here. You know what this place is. Don’t make me do this.”

Nino frowned. ‘This is my place, too! We share, and if Jun wants to stay here, he can stay on my half.”

“Your half?” 

“Yeah, my half of the warehouse.”

Sho was fuming. It had been years since he’d been this angry, and for the first time, he wanted to reach out and punch Nino in the stomach. How could he not see what he was doing by bringing another person into their space? The danger that would put them both in? They had a great thing going, and Nino was going to risk it all for some random guy he’d spent a few hours with? That frothy, sick feeling was back in his stomach, and he realized it was the feeling of betrayal. 

With the anger and hurt thundering through him, beating in his ears and turning everything else to white noise, he charged through the back door and out into the night. 

 

That was the first time in what felt like years that Sho killed someone outside the space, without Nino. It was a Friday, the streets were packed with people despite the late hour, and Sho pulled one at random into the alley behind a train station. It was a woman, and she drunkenly mistook him for someone named Hiro. She kept trying to wrap her arms around him like a python, kissing at his face and telling him how much she’d missed him until Sho snapped her neck. Then he spent some time smashing her face in with a rock. 

It felt good, to do it alone. He knew how upset and hurt Nino would feel once he found out, that he had broken their pact of never killing without the other present. Sho felt a bit more level-headed after, a little more in control, and he decided not to head back to his apartment as he’d originally planned. The space was his, and leaving now would seem like he was conceding to letting the garbage dump live in his space. So instead, he headed back the way he came, keeping to the alleys until he got back to his car. 

Nino was, as predicted, furious.

“What did you do?”

Sho ignored the question and closed the door. He’d made it back to the space without incident, despite the blood spray across his face and sweater. 

Nino charged forward, blocking Sho’s path with his small body. “I asked, what did you do?”

Again Sho ignored him, easily side-stepping around Nino and making his way to the kitchen. From the tiny alcove he could hear Jun ask, “What was that about?” Sho was delighted to hear that Jun sounded nervous.

Continuing to ignore Nino’s increasingly emotional demands for an explanation, Sho opened the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water, popping the cap off, and drank until the bottle was empty. They had running water in the warehouse but they didn’t want to risk drinking it, so they usually kept the fridge stocked with plastic bottles you could buy by the case. Still, drinking water wasn’t easily accessible out here, and Sho grinned as he opened a second bottle once he’d finished the first, delighting in his excessive use of things that were still technically half-Nino’s. If Nino was going to be selfish, then so could he. 

“Sho, tell me what you did.” Judging from the proximity of his voice, Nino had walked up behind him. 

Sho ignored him. 

“You did something stupid, didn’t you.”

“No less stupid than inviting a stranger to move in with us here,” he said, without turning around.

“He won’t do anything! He needs a place to stay, and I’ve already talked to him, and-”

“Excuse me, Sho-san?” Jun peered around the doorway, squinting into the dark and looking incredibly anxious. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but if you don’t get that sweater in some hydrogen peroxide right away, it’ll be ruined. Do you have any?” There was a long pause during which Sho and Nino both stared at Jun in confusion, and Jun’s face grew more concerned. “Please, it’s going to stain.”

After another bewildered pause, Nino said, “In the cabinet next to the shower. In the black bottle.” Jun quickly vanished from view, and Nino turned back to Sho. “See? He won’t go to the police, I’ve already kind of told him-” Jun came back, slipping past Nino to stand in front of Sho, holding up the peroxide like a peace offering, “what… we do here,” Nino finished awkwardly. 

Sho narrowed his eyes at Jun in open contempt. “And when he sees it happen, what then? Do you think he’ll be able to handle living with people like us? Because I highly doubt it.”

“Sho-san, please. Your sweater.”

Jun advanced a step closer, and Sho took a step back. “What the fuck is your problem?”

Jun seemed honestly surprised by Sho’s reaction, and his eyes widened comically. “I just don’t want the blood to stain. I like things to be clean.”

Sho made eye contact with Nino over Jun’s shoulder, and Nino shrugged. Sho pulled his sweater over his head, and handed it to Jun, who immediately turned and left the room. They heard the shower kick on a few seconds later. 

“See?” Nino said, gesturing out towards where Jun was apparently washing Sho’s sweater. “I told him that we do things here that are highly illegal, and I even hinted at what those things are, and he didn’t even flinch. He’s weird, maybe even weird like us.”

“I don’t care, Nino, I-”

“Excuse me!” Jun’s voice came drifting over the sound of the water. “There’s some blood stains in your shower here, do you mind if I take care of those as well?”

Nino glanced at Sho, raising his eyebrows. “Go ahead!” he called back. “We could even have him help out here,” Nino said, dropping his voice to a near-whisper that Sho had to lean forward to hear over the shower. “He likes to clean, doesn’t seem to be squeamish, this could be a really good thing for us, Sho.” 

Sho rubbed at his cheek with one hand. Now that the blood had mostly dried, his face itched. “Fine,” he finally decided, “but you’re next, and you’re going to do it in front of him. This week. And if his reaction is bad, then he’s my next choice.”

Nino smiled, and there was a bit of the cold-hearted, murderous Nino that Sho was used to back on his face. “Okay.”

 

 

“You have to take him to the eye doctor.”

“Absolutely not.”

It was the next morning, and Jun had already run into the wall three separate times. A bruise was forming on his forehead where he’d smacked it particularly hard on the doorway to the kitchen. Nino had had to help him safely into the shower so he didn’t slip with his feet bare, much to Jun’s embarrassment. 

“Come on, Sho, he can’t see!”

“And why is that my problem? He’s not my pet.”

Nino rolled his eyes. “He’s not anyone’s pet, he’s a person with bad eyesight.”

“Again, why is that my problem?”

Nino put his head in his hands. “Please, Sho?” he asked, the sound of his voice muffled and desperate and very un-Nino-like.

“Why don’t you just take him?”

“I can’t, I can’t drive. And you know how I am with… people.”

Jun wandered out of the shower, dripping wet and draped in a towel. He made it slowly towards the loft, waving his hand carefully in front of his face, and he still managed to run straight into the ladder. “Oof!” he said quietly, as he bounced back. 

Both his hands went to rub at his forehead where he’d hit it for the second time that morning, and the towel dropped to the floor. Sho cocked his head to the side, enjoying the view. Jun was a major annoyance, but his body was definitely nice to look at.

“Great, I’ll take that as a yes.” Nino said smugly. 

 

Sho was less than thrilled that Nino had roped him into taking his least favorite person on the planet to pick up new glasses. 

The ride to the mall was mostly in silence, because Sho had only consented to driving Jun if he laid down in the backseat with a blindfold over his eyes, to prevent him from being able to bring the cops back to the warehouse. Jun had agreed without complaint, which Sho hadn’t predicted. He’d had an entire (now unnecessary) argument planned out, word by word, but Jun had immediately gotten in the back, tied one of Sho’s ties around his eyes, and laid down. A huge wave of warmth washed over him at the sight of Jun with the blindfold on. Sho hadn’t predicted that, either. He avoided looking in the rear view mirror for the entire drive. 

The trip was not quick. They found the store easily, but Jun tried on what felt like every pair of glasses in the place, asking for Sho’s opinion about each of them. Most of the time Sho didn’t bother replying, but there was one pair that Jun picked up, a pair of black ones with thick frames, that made Sho’s stomach feel weird the second they touched Jun’s nose. “Those are good,” left his lips before he could stop himself. 

Jun smiled, and waved down the nearest employee. “We’ll take these ones,” he said, handing her the frames. Sho felt his face heat up, and he nearly ran out of the store to get some fresh air, leaving Jun to deal with the rest of the order.

He came out a few minutes later, wearing the ugliest pair of glasses Sho had ever seen. They were thin wire frames, too big for his face, and the lenses were glinting in the harsh mall lighting. 

Jun touched them self consciously when he got to Sho. “They had a loaner pair in my prescription, so.”

“I didn’t ask. Let’s go.”

 

 

“You don’t have to blindfold me. I’m not going to the cops.”

Sho scoffed. “And I’m supposed to just trust you.”

They were standing in front of the car in the parking lot, talking in hushed voices. There were droves of families around, the mall was packed because it was a Saturday. A kid wandered close by, staring up at Jun and Sho as he walked past, before his family called him back over and he scampered off. 

“It’d be pretty stupid of me if I did, I have no money and nowhere else to go.” 

“It being stupid doesn’t mean you won’t do it.”

“I haven’t run away screaming yet. I’ve had many opportunities to, but I haven’t.”

“Doesn’t mean you aren’t planning to.”

“I could just not wear the glasses--”

“No.”

Jun sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. Somehow, when he took his hand away, every strand was still perfectly in place. Stupid pretty boy, Sho thought with disgust.

“I’ll be honest, then, Sho-san. Blindfolds I’m fine with, but being in a car while blindfolded gave me motion sickness on the way here. I don’t really want to throw up in your car.”

“That’s a pretty horrible lie,” Sho said, squinting at Jun through the glare of the sun.

“Fine,” Jun said, “it’s up to you if you believe me or not, but as much as I like to clean, vomit is one thing I will not touch, so you’ll have to clean your car yourself if I’m not lying.”

Sho’s nose wrinkled in revulsion at the idea. Wordlessly, and incredibly annoyed, he opened the passenger door to let Jun inside the car. 

 

They were nearly home when Jun suddenly yelled out, “Stop! Wait, go back!”

Sho jumped at the sound. The car ride had been silent aside from Jun turning on the radio for a few seconds before Sho had reached forward and slammed his fist down on the off button. His foot was halfway to the brake before he remembered they were in the middle of a busy street. “What?!” he asked, irritated at being startled. 

“That park! Can we go back to that park?”

“Are you serious?”

Jun turned to look at him. “I’ve always wanted to go to that park before, but we- I never had the time. It’ll be really quick.”

“That’s what you said about the glasses,” Sho mumbled, but he was already turning around. 

The park was gorgeous, but Sho wasn’t going to tell Jun that. It was small, but the dense trees created an almost forested feeling, and flowers were in bloom everywhere. There was a large pond in the center, with a beautiful bridge that led out to a covered gazebo. Lily pads were floating on the surface of the lake, and the croaking of frogs was echoing throughout the area. 

Jun strode forward quickly, leaving Sho chasing after him to catch up. 

“Where are you going?”

“To the gazebo. It’s so beautiful here!”

“You said this would only take a few minutes.”

“Don’t worry, Sho-san,” Jun looked back at him and grinned, it was cute and boyish and Sho frowned. “You won’t have to suffer here long.”

“I’m not suffering,” Sho grumbled to himself as he tried to catch up. 

Standing out in the gazebo was like standing on the water itself. Jun leaned over the barrier to gaze down into the pond. “Look, there’s a fish!” He pointed down into the water. Sho’s eyes didn’t move from Jun’s face. He was like a kid, his excitement felt almost physical, contagious. “Man, I wish I could come here all the time. It’s so peaceful.”

“Did you live close to here? Before?”

Jun bit his lip and hummed. “Sort of. But I passed by this place on the bus once, and I always wanted to come back here. It never really worked out.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated.”

Sho finally tore his gaze away from Jun and looked out at the water. He didn’t know why he was suddenly curious about Jun, but there were questions beginning to bubble up inside of him, making him feel stuffy and confused. Despite that, Jun broke the silence first. 

“What do you do when you’re not at the warehouse? Nino was kind of vague on that.”

Sho looked down and saw a rock was sitting on the wood floor of the gazebo. He bent down to pick it up. “I’m a professor,” he said, “at the university downtown.” He let the rock fall from his hand, landing in the water with a splash. It sank quickly. 

“What do you teach?”

“Chemistry.”

“Do you like it?”

Sho turned towards Jun. Jun was watching him, his face open and hopeful. Sho looked away again. “Let’s go back.”

 

Nino had been quick to choose his victim when they went out a few days later. Sho had expected Nino would take it easy in order not to frighten Jun, but the time Nino had gone without hurting someone had clearly been harder on him than Sho had expected. 

The man laid on the floor, covered in hundreds of small cuts from Nino’s knife, sobbing in a growing puddle of his own blood, until Nino finally eviscerated him. Even with his intestines hanging out of his own stomach, the man hadn’t died right away. He’d been sobbing, choking on his own blood for over a minute before he finally fell silent. 

It had lasted nearly an hour, and Jun watched the whole thing from the chair, his eyes never wavering from the man as Nino butchered him. His expression had been mostly unreadable but he didn’t seem frightened, and Sho was almost disappointed that he hadn’t freaked out and run for the door. 

After it was all over, Jun had sighed heavily. “You made a mess.”

Nino swiped a hand across his face, leaving a bright red streak under his nose. “Huh?” he asked, and Sho could recognize the wild look in his eyes signifying that he hadn’t come all the way down from his high yet.

But Jun didn’t reply, instead he got up from his seat and went to the kitchen, coming back with two buckets, one empty and one filled partly with soapy water. He set it on the floor, then went to the cabinet by the shower to grab their bleach and a towel. 

“Can you remove the body?” Jun asked Nino, not picking up on the fact that Nino was still mostly gone and barely had the ability to string together full sentences. 

Jun looked to Sho when he got no answer, and Sho stepped forward to grab the corpse by the ankles. He pulled, leaving a thick trail of blood behind. 

“Ugh, no! Stop!” 

Sho dropped the ankles and they hit the concrete with dual thuds. Jun huffed in frustration. 

“How do you usually do this?”

“We wait.”

“What?”

Sho pointed at Nino who was still pacing the floor, chewing his nails. “I come out of it faster than he does. We wait until he’s calmed down, then both of us cut up the body and carry the pieces into the barrel.” He pointed at the heavy metal barrel standing in the corner. “Then we melt it with lye.”

Jun looked down at the mess on the floor. “And we’re supposed to just let all this sit here until then?”

Sho waved his hand. “Be my guest.”

It had been more of a taunt than anything, but when Jun actually got on his knees with a sigh of frustration and picked up the towel, Sho’s mouth almost fell open in surprise. 

The act of murder itself didn't necessarily turn him on. Occasionally he'd get off on the sounds and feelings of the bones breaking, or blood running between his fingers or squelching under his feet when he moved a certain way. The feelings of causing physical change on an otherwise unchanging, solid form such as a body was more satisfying than sexy, and the act of killing someone itself didn't get him hot and bothered the way he'd heard of it affecting others. This, though, this was different. 

Despite his dislike for their newest addition, Sho knew Jun was attractive. He was incredibly muscular for someone who had been left in a dumpster to die, and had sharp features contrasted only by the softness of a few moles dotted around his mouth, his thick but soft eyebrows, his full lips, the soft pink of his tongue. The sight of such a beautiful man on his knees, dutifully wiping up the blood from the floor which he had watched Nino spill from another person, that was a head rush that felt entirely different than killing. 

Sho bit his lip, trying to keep his breathing under control, and watched Jun raise the soaked towel, wringing it out into a bucket. Blood poured from the cloth, and flecks of it flew to land on the pale, scarred skin of Jun's cheek, but he didn't flinch away. Sho felt a hot flare of arousal in his gut. 

Jun raised his eyes from the bucket, as if sensing Sho staring at him, and when their eyes met, he smirked. It was a cocky, triumphant smirk that both infuriated Sho and made the heat burning through him flare a degree hotter. He exhaled hard through his nose and turned on his heels, making a beeline for the shower. 

 

As time passed, it didn’t get any easier to watch Jun clean up after them, and it became even harder to be around him any other time. Jun was stubborn, competitive, and he didn’t take the fact that Sho openly wanted him out of the warehouse lightly. 

Jun seemed determined to win him over, and his persistence would have been commendable if it wasn’t so damn irritating. 

Jun loved to cook, and Sho woke up every morning to a breakfast that Jun prepared himself. Which would have been fine, great even, if Jun hadn’t also gotten into the annoying habit of borrowing Sho’s car without asking, driving to the grocery store, buying a bunch of incredibly overpriced and ridiculously fancy food with Nino’s suitcase money, and stuffing their tiny fridge to the brim. 

Sho once came home to Jun doing laundry in a washing machine he’d bought on their dime without consulting anyone else. He swept the floors, took out the garbage, was on his best behavior, all while insisting Sho needed new, more fashionable clothes. He hung curtains from the boarded up windows, actual curtains. 

Everything Jun did to impress Sho and convince him he was worth keeping around had an irritating streak of independence and arrogance under it. And Sho still wanted him gone.

One time Sho came home from campus and another car was pulling out of the driveway. Sho had about two full minutes of blinding panic coursing through his veins before he walked inside to find Jun and Nino sitting on the loft, surrounded by enough takeout boxes of Chinese food to feed a family of ten. Jun had ordered delivery to the warehouse, and Sho had nearly had a heart attack he’d been so frustrated. That led to their first ever full blown fight, and Sho had spent an entire week living back at his apartment in the city. 

But then there were the nights when they had their fun, and once a body was lying on the ground, torn apart and unmoving, then Jun would undress and Sho’s divine bi-monthly torture would begin. 

Jun had pretty hands, and Sho would watch them go about their work obsessively. There was no longer any pretense on Jun’s part about the way he cleaned; he knew Sho was watching him, and Sho was aware Jun had started putting on a show for him. Sho had made a promise to himself never to let his resolve crack in front of Jun, no matter how hard Jun tried to tease or irritate him enough into caving in. 

Only when Jun finally rose from the floor, wet with blood and headed for the shower, did Sho allow himself to unzip his pants, take his erection in his hand, and jerk off as quickly as he could. He probably didn’t have to rush as much as he did, Jun liked long showers and after a night of cleaning he could stay in the shower long enough to cause concern, but Sho didn’t want to risk anyone knowing what Jun did to him. So with fast, punishing strokes, he’d masturbate until he came into his balled up t-shirt. 

It didn’t occur to him until after months of doing this that Jun did the laundry every night, and he had probably been able to figure out what was going on, that he had probably put his shirts into the wash when the come was still wet on the fabric. 

The realization made Sho’s head spin. 

 

Sho made it all the way to April before his resolve finally cracked. 

A year had passed since he had run into Nino in the alleyway, and nearly six months since Jun had joined their odd little family. Sho had given up on Jun leaving them, instead accepting it begrudgingly. Jun still constantly got on his nerves, but he was useful, if nothing else.

It had been Sho’s turn, and there was a body lying on the ground, a thick puddle of blood slowly seeping across the floor. Jun didn't even ask for Nino and Sho to remove the body from his work space before pulling his clothing off quickly and crouching down in only his briefs to begin to mop the blood off the floor with a towel. Despite the now familiar sight, Sho still found himself transfixed by Jun, nearly naked with his hair hanging in his face as he soaked a towel in the red mess before wringing it out over a bucket. 

He was sitting on the couch, and still panting from the physical effort beating the man on the floor to death had required, when Jun looked up at him. They held eye contact, and Sho refused to look away first. The result was an intense staring match, Sho on the couch and Jun with his hands buried in the bloody towel on the floor. 

Jun looked away. He wrung the towel out, then repeated the motion over and over, time passing by at a crawl as Sho watched him. 

The second time their gaze met it was different. Jun’s eyes seemed to have trouble staying focused on one thing, and they raked over Sho’s body hungrily. Sho had taken his shirt off during the murder, leaving him only in his white tank top he frequently wore under t-shirts, and even though he wasn’t the most muscular man on the planet, Jun was looking at him like he wanted to swallow him whole. 

If Jun was getting a good look, Sho figured he might as well do the same. He took in Jun’s impossibly wide shoulders, his equally impossibly tiny waist, the mole right next to his nipple. He moved to Jun’s hands, still working with the towel to get blood off the floor and into the bucket. When he let his eyes wander further, Sho was unsurprised but very pleased to find Jun was hard as a rock in his briefs, his cock straining against the fabric. Sho’s mouth welled up with saliva. 

By the time Sho dragged his eyes back to Jun’s face, Jun’s expression had gone from playful and taunting to playful and taunting with a visible tinge of needy. Sho knew a similar expression was on his own face, he was already breathing hard and they hadn’t even touched yet. 

As Sho watched, Jun brought one hand up, holding it in the air for a few seconds before placing it against the skin of his chest, slowly dragging it down. It left a stripe of bright blood across his pale skin, and Sho heard himself groan. With his own blood coursing through his ears, the sound seemed far away. 

It was difficult to pull his eyes away from the trail of Jun’s hand, slowly moving his fingers along his torso, leaving shiny, wet lines of red in their wake. When Sho met Jun’s eyes again, there was a blatant challenge there, one Sho didn’t intend to lose. 

Later, when he thought back on it, Sho wasn’t sure who kissed who first. For the rest of his life he would tell everyone who would listen that it had been Jun, that Jun was so overwhelmed with desire for him that he leapt up off the floor, still covered in blood that wasn’t his, and nearly jumped into Sho’s arms. 

The truth of it was, it was both of them. One second Jun was on the floor and Sho was sitting on the couch and the next they were both standing, Jun’s hands cradling Sho’s jaw, kissing him so intensely that Sho saw stars. But he gave as good as he got, and didn’t hesitate to slip his tongue into Jun’s mouth the second Jun parted his lips in a pleasured sigh. 

There were streaks of blood up Jun’s arms, and smeared fingerprints were left wherever Sho grabbed him. Their kisses were hurried and rough, and Sho hissed when he felt Jun bite his lip hard enough draw the taste of his own blood into his mouth. He grabbed a handful of Jun’s hair and yanked it in retaliation, pulling Jun’s head back and baring his neck. The first bite to Jun’s throat was a hard one, and the strained moan it pulled out of Jun was enough to make Sho feel weak in the knees.

Somehow they made it to the couch, Sho sitting with his legs spread and Jun on his lap. There were hands and blood everywhere, Jun’s legs were red from his thighs down to his toes, and the couch was smeared with every movement. Jun pulled on Sho’s tank top, leaving stains of blood on the white fabric. 

“Off,” he said, in between kisses. 

Sho obliged, shifting awkwardly to pull the shirt over his head and drop it somewhere behind the couch. With the skin bare, Jun’s hands immediately began moving over his torso, first twisting and flicking Sho’s nipples until Sho was squirming under him, then moving down to feel the muscles of his abdomen, finally coming to rest on Sho’s shoulders as he rocked his hips forward on Sho’s lap. After a few minutes the blood began to dry on Jun’s skin, and Sho could feel itchy smears of it on his own body where Jun’s hands had been. 

“Want to fuck you,” Sho murmured against the sweaty skin of Jun’s neck, and he reached down to squeeze Jun’s ass through his underwear before slipping his hands inside. Jun’s hips surged forward, rutting his erection against Sho’s own visible tent in his jeans with a gasp. 

“Then fuck me,” Jun said breathlessly.

Sho wanted to punch himself when he realized he needed to get his lube from the loft, but without letting himself dwell on it, he lifted Jun off his lap and dumped him on the couch. Jun let out a surprised sound that was nearly a squawk, but Sho was already halfway up the ladder and barely heard it. 

When he came back to the couch with lube in hand, it was to the sight of Jun sprawled across the couch, his underwear gone and jerking himself off lazily. Sho’s hands were suddenly so sweaty that he nearly dropped the bottle.

“I don’t have condoms. I wasn’t expecting…”

Jun rolled his eyes. “Come here.” Sho sat on the couch, his eyes watching the movement of Jun’s hand as he touched himself. “Here, use these and wipe your hands, they’re ruined anyway.” Jun handed Sho his underwear, barely recognizable under the grime from Jun’s own hands.

“I could wash-”

“I don’t want to wait.” 

Sho worked as quickly as he could to rid his hands of blood, even swiping under his fingernails, but then Jun spread his legs and hiked one over the back of the couch in a show of flexibility that had Sho’s jaw going slack and he suddenly forgot about his hands. 

He watched Jun touch himself for a few seconds, taking in the twitching of Jun’s thighs, the way his eyebrows were furrowed, the moles dotting along his neck and torso. Jun really was beautiful. 

But then he moved quickly to kick Sho hard in the chest and sent him nearly toppling off the couch. 

“I thought you said you wanted to fuck me, not sit there and watch.”

Sho frowned at him. “I could do nothing, if you’re going to be an asshole about it.”

“Fine.” 

Jun lunged forward and grabbed the bottle of lube from the couch where Sho had put it down, but before he could open it, Sho reached and snatched it back out of his hands. 

“Spread your fucking legs.”

There as a grin on Jun’s lips as he moved, and Sho wanted to either kiss him senseless or punch him squarely in the jaw or both. But then Jun pulled one of his legs to his chest, and Sho’s mind went blissfully blank for the second time.

Jun gasped when Sho slid the first finger inside of him, but Sho didn’t give him much time to enjoy the preparation. He moved quickly but thoroughly, knowing that after months of wanting he was apt to be a very short fuse and he had no desire to waste even a second of time that he had to be inside Jun. 

Once he deemed Jun sufficiently prepared for him, he moved to hover over him, but before he could even line himself up, Jun pushed Sho backwards with a hand on his chest. 

“What-”

“I’m gonna ride you.”

Jun was flushed and sweaty and still covered in smears of blood, and Sho wanted him badly. He allowed Jun to move him back on the couch, and watched with his mouth slightly open as Jun straddled him. When he sank down on Sho’s cock, Sho groaned, letting his head fall back against the backrest of the couch. 

He felt so good, so warm and tight and slick and perfect. and Sho dug his fingernails into Jun’s thighs to prevent him from moving, but Jun ignored the gesture. 

The first raise of Jun’s hips had them both moaning, and Jun’s hands tightened on Sho’s shoulders. 

Jun, Sho quickly learned, was fond of kisses during sex. Despite their frenzied, harsh movements, he alternated between wet, sloppy kisses and harsh bites that left spatters of blue and purple to join the streaks of red already decorating Sho’s skin. When he bit Sho hard enough on the shoulder for a blood bruise to bloom immediately, Sho took hold of Jun’s hair and pulled, but the counter-aggression seemed to only spur Jun on. 

Jun was picking up his pace, riding Sho almost effortlessly. The muscles in his thighs worked under Sho’s palms and Sho wondered, not for the first time, where Jun got the muscular body that allowed him to move so fluidly with seemingly endless endurance. The thought was wiped from his mind when Jun swiveled his hips a certain way, and Sho shut his eyes with a whine that he promised himself he would never admit to later. 

His eyes were only closed for a few seconds before Jun abruptly stopped moving in his lap, and Sho lifted his head. Jun was looking over his shoulder at the chair in the corner of the room. 

Nino had come back silently at some point and was sitting in the chair, watching them, his feet perched on the edge of the seat and his chin on his knees. 

Jun glanced back at Sho, his eyebrows raised in question. There was no hesitation or anxiety on Jun's face, just plain curiosity, and Sho was thrilled. 

"It's okay," Sho said, leaning down to nip at Jun's collarbone, murmuring against his skin. "He's just going to watch."

Jun furrowed his eyebrows and released a tiny, breathy moan. He lifted himself slowly, until Sho's cock was barely inside him, then slid down quickly. He repeated the action a few times, as if making sure that Nino could see Sho filling him up from his seat in the chair behind him. Sho had known Jun was a show off, but finding out that also extended to his sex life was a discovery that pleased him greatly. 

Sho looked over Jun's shoulder and saw Nino’s feet drop to the floor so he could unzip his pants. Sho grinned, then brought his attention back to Jun.

With his hands grasping Jun’s hips, Sho bucked up into him once roughly. Jun’s moan of surprise encouraged him, and he began to work up a pace that had him quickly covered in sweat again. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Sho saw Nino get up from the chair to kick his pants off his legs, then move closer. 

Jun liked being watched. He had been rough and frantic before Nino had joined them, but with a voyeur on the other side of the room, Jun was desperate. He moaned as Sho filled him over and over, whining for more, harder, faster. Sho shifted his hips a bit and Jun cried out in a broken sob, squeezing his eyes shut as he panted. If Sho wasn’t so turned on himself he would have laughed.

“You like that?”

“Fuck you.” 

Sho did huff out a laugh at that, then flipped them over, throwing each of Jun’s legs over his shoulders and thrusting back into him before he had time to complain about the change in position or the loss of Sho inside him. 

Nino moved closer, his hand now working over his cock in quick strokes, his eyes roaming over the two of them on the couch quickly. His eyebrows were furrowed in a look of concentration that Sho had only seen him wear before when he was cutting people up. 

Sho fucked Jun hard, relishing the sounds he was making as he tried his best to hold onto the couch and Sho at the same time. His back arched when Sho shifted his hips again, his mouth falling open in a gasp of, “There, right there! Oh, god, Sho, fuck me.” 

Sho did as asked, sweat beginning to bead on his forehead as he tried to speed up his hips. 

Nino moved his fist faster as Sho moved, trying to match the pace that he set. His eyes kept darting between the place where Sho’s cock was disappearing into Jun and up to Sho’s face. 

Jun was panting under him, and Sho leaned down to capture his mouth in a kiss. He felt Jun’s hand move to his hair, then there was a painful sting as he pulled. Sho leaned down to bite along Jun’s neck in retaliation, pausing to suck a dark bruise into the skin. It was a mistake; the sight of the mark on Jun was enough to make the arousal flare hotter in Sho’s gut and he worried for a few seconds that he wouldn’t be able to stave off the wave and would finish too quickly. But then the danger subsided, and he was able to pick up his pace, carefully avoiding looking at the bruise too closely. 

The problem was he wanted to leave more. 

He thought he understood Jun’s love of biting more clearly now.

Nino grunted as he worked his hand over himself. He was standing right next to the couch now. “Wanna, wanna come on him,” he panted, looking to Sho for permission. The request felt like a strong punch to Sho’s gut, and he groaned. He didn’t hesitate before he nodded his consent.

“Fuck,” Jun whimpered, closing his eyes and trying to stay still as Sho moved his hips faster. 

Nino moaned softly high in the back of his throat as his orgasm hit, and streaks of come painted Jun’s chest, some landing on his chin, and one stripe across his cheek and the bridge of his nose. 

Sho looked down at Jun, at Nino’s come dripping off his face, and swore lowly. 

With his contribution made, Nino didn’t stick around. He backed away quickly, vanishing through the doorway that led to the bathroom. A few seconds later, they heard the shower kick on. 

Sho could tell Jun was close, he was pushing his hips back onto Sho’s cock insistently, and Sho was right behind him. When Jun came, it was with a gasp of Sho’s name on his lips. He dug his nails into Sho’s back, leaving long scratches that were deep enough to bring dots of blood to the surface in several places. The pain was enough to push Sho himself over the edge, and he pulled out just in time, coming in hot spurts onto Jun’s stomach to join Jun’s own release. 

Jun made a face. “Ugh, we made a mess.” 

He used his fingers to gather up some of the come from his face, reaching forward quickly before Sho could move away to grab his hair with his other hand and hold him in place. 

“Here.” Jun used one come-covered finger to prod at Sho’s lips, and Sho opened them obediently, humming at the bitter taste of Nino on his tongue. Together they got Jun’s face mostly cleaned off that way, and by the time Sho bent to lick the mess up from Jun’s stomach, they were both hard again. 

It was a long time before they made it off the couch. 

 

That night they all slept together, Jun wrapped around Sho’s back, his arms held tightly across Sho’s torso, and Sho with his arm wrapped around Nino in the same way, and after that, Sho didn’t complain about Jun as much. Sure, he was incredibly stubborn and competitive which made him a pain in the ass in a lot of ways, and he seemed to get immense pleasure out of riling Sho up and making him as frustrated as possible, but it was worth it for the times when all that fell away and Sho had Jun pliant and needy under him, for the mornings when Sho woke up to Jun curled around him, and for the nights when Jun held his hand tightly under the blankets. 

 

Months passed, and things continued on much in the same way they had before group sex was involved. Sho alternated between work and the space, coming home every night to find Nino playing video games on an old TV he’d dragged up to the loft, Jun more often than not curled up on the futon behind him with his nose buried in a book that Sho had brought him from his modest library at his apartment. 

Sho barely stayed in his apartment anymore, only really going back to get his mail, clean up the dust every once in awhile, and keep up appearances. Jun, like Nino, remained suspiciously tight-lipped about his past. Sho was content to float in mystery.

Instead, they got to know each other in other ways.

Sho had no problems getting up early, but Jun wasn’t a morning person, and he would grumble angrily if Sho woke up him when he got up to get ready for work. This led to their only real fights, none of which lasted longer than the time it took Sho to get undressed again for rushed and wild make up sex. Once exhausted and sated, Jun would roll back over and fall asleep again, as if Sho had never woken him up in the first place. 

Jun was particular about his kitchen, and the warehouse didn’t have one. He’d managed to do okay cooking things that could be served raw or with minimal preparation on a grill (they’d gotten a small one at a store and Jun used it daily), but sensing Jun’s frustration with his lack of counter space, Sho used two days’ worth of vacation time to buy some ready-made cabinets and countertops and install them in the corner of the warehouse under the loft. It wasn’t much and hadn’t taken much work, but it did the job, and Jun had nearly cried when he’d seen the carefully designed area for him to cook in. When he opened one of the cabinets and saw Sho had stuffed it full of bleach, towels, and about ten boxes of trash bags, he had cried. 

Which is how Sho learned Jun was extremely sensitive when he felt comfortable enough to let his guard down. He’d cry during sad movies, he’d cry if he got drunk enough and a sentimental topic came up, he cried the first time “I love you,” slipped past Sho’s lips.

 

 

It was in their second summer together that Nino developed his crush, though he hated whenever Jun or Sho would call it that, and he’d insist with his hands balled into fists at his sides that it was not a crush. 

Jun’s order of Chinese delivery had been infuriating but unfortunately, also delicious. The restaurant’s dishes were cheap but plentiful, and even picky eater Nino loved a variety of different menu items they had to offer, so they continued to place orders, being careful to meticulously clean the space so nothing could be seen from the open door that would indicate anything weirder than three men living in a warehouse in an abandoned industrial complex. 

But after Sho came out of the shower one day to the sight of Nino standing by the door, anxiously shifting from foot to foot, he began to realize what was actually going on. 

“What are you waiting for?” he asked, teasing. “The food won’t be here for another half an hour.”

“‘M not waiting,” Nino mumbled, and he slunk away to the couch, sitting on the edge as if electricity was flowing through him.

Sho took a seat next to him, using the towel that was around his shoulders to dry his hair. 

“So, which one is it?”

“Huh?”

“Which guy do you have a crush on?”

At the word crush, Nino glared sideways at Sho, but his feet were still doing the weird hopping he did when he was anxious. 

“You can tell me, Nino, it’s okay. I won’t judge you for it.”

Sho was about to give up when Nino nearly whispered, “The short one.”

Sho remembered the delivery guy who could conceivably be called “the short one.” He was tan, with a perpetual sleepy look on his face and brown hair that somehow always seemed just on the verge of out of control. There was a scar on one of his cheeks, and that was what Sho remembered the most vividly. 

“Want to talk to him if he comes?”

“No.”

“Come on, Nino! Nothing bad will happen if you just talk to him.”

Jun came down the ladder behind them. “What are you guys talking about?”

“Nino’s got a crush,” Sho said, smiling over the back of the couch at Jun.

“I do not!” Nino nearly yelled, but then there was a knock on the door, and he darted onto the floor behind the couch quicker than Sho would have thought possible. 

Jun was laughing, looking fondly down at where Nino was hiding. He gestured at Sho to go get their food. 

Opening the door revealed not “the short one,” but who could only be described as “the tall one.” He was the opposite of his counterpart in every possible way. He was, obviously, much taller than Nino’s crush, even taller than Jun. He was always energetic, incredibly upbeat, and even though he shared the brown hair of his coworker, the taller delivery guy’s hair was always somehow shiny and perfectly in place. He was unnaturally handsome, and Sho had thought more than once that if he wasn’t so in love with what he already had, he would have invited the cute guy who, in the past, had introduced himself as something like Aino (or was it Aida?) inside.

“Is it him?” Nino asked from behind the couch, and Sho snorted. 

“No, it’s not.”

Nino’s eyes peeked above the back of the couch. 

If the man standing in their doorway found this exchange odd at all, he didn’t show it; his grin hadn’t faltered since Sho had opened the door. 

“Hey, there!” he said, offering up the giant bag of food. Sho took it and handed it off to Jun, pulling his wallet out of his pants pocket as he went back to the door. 

The next week it was Nino’s crush who came to their door, another enormous bag of food in his hands. Nino had taken shelter on the loft the second he’d heard that Sho was ordering Chinese for dinner, but when Sho saw who was at the door, he called out to him and asked him to bring his wallet down. 

Nino had been visibly fuming at Sho’s insistence on dragging him into the situation, but, like his coworker, the shorter delivery boy was equally inept at spotting the awkward atmosphere. 

Sho managed to get a casual conversation going about the weather, and from there about the delivery boy, whose name was Ohno, personally. Sho tipped him largely once he revealed he was single, then excused himself to sit on the couch and begin opening the boxes of food as Ohno counted the cash, leaving Nino standing awkwardly by Ohno’s side.

“Whoa, you guys are so nice!” Ohno said, when he realized Sho had given him nearly a forty percent tip. “You know what’s funny? The first time I got a delivery here I totally thought I was going to get murdered.”

Nino forced a laugh, managing somehow to sound like a broken robot. He looked at Sho frantically over Ohno’s shoulder for help. 

Sho got the conversation going more smoothly again from his place on the couch, and Nino held up his end pretty well for about five minutes, but then he ran out of answers for Ohno’s increasingly personal questions. Sho swooped in for a third time, and nudged Ohno out the door with sly politeness. 

When he was gone, Nino collapsed on the couch next to Sho. 

“I never want to talk to him again,” he said, putting both his hands over his face. 

But he did talk to Ohno again. Every time he would show up at the house delivering food, he’d stay a little longer, talking more and more easily with Nino. He had accepted Nino’s no touching rule without questions, and one day, with Sho and Jun’s permission, Nino had asked Ohno to stay the night. That had led to a stupendously exhausting foursome that Sho had needed two full days to recover from. 

The relationship continued for a few months with Ohno assuming they were squatters until he discovered a bloody towel that Jun hadn’t managed to fit in a trash bag the night before under the sink. There were some awkward questions, and they unanimously decided that things would have to stop. 

Nino was surprisingly okay with it, if anything he seemed almost relieved. When Sho asked him about it later, he shrugged. “I liked him too much and started wanting to cut him. It’s better this way.” 

After that, they no longer ordered anything for delivery. 

 

As autumn turned to winter, the warehouse got increasingly difficult to live in. 

When it was summer, a few fans kept the place at least cool enough to be comfortable. But even though there was electricity in the building, there was no heat, and winters were hard. The first year, they’d purchased a giant space heater and lugged it up onto the loft, but it had broken after two months of use. For their second winter, Nino purchased two bigger, nicer heaters, and combined they were enough to keep the three of them warm while they slept. The days were so cold that Sho would often come home to find Jun and Nino curled up under the blankets, the heaters burning bright around them, casting a hazy orange glow onto their futon. 

The only time they weren’t cold was when one of them was in the process of butchering someone. Then, the chill in the air always seemed to magically disappear, despite the fact that they could see each breath they took inside. 

It was late December, and Sho knew that Nino was close to finished with the body at his feet. He had been working on the man sprawled across their floor for close to two hours, and the guy was barely breathing. Nino was circling him like a shark, darting out every so often to place a new cut somewhere on his body, breathing rapidly with exertion. 

When Nino was done ten minutes later, Jun stretched his arms above his head, and Sho watched the movement of his body hungrily. After months of cleaning up murder scenes, Jun had started to not bother to wear clothes at all on the summer nights when he cleaned in order to save himself some laundry. In the winter, he had given up, sticking to thermal wear under a sweater. But seeing Jun move so gracefully was no less enticing under layers of clothing, and Sho had been riled up all day, eagerly anticipating both Nino’s time on the floor and Jun’s turn once Nino had finished. 

Jun was halfway to his feet when the man on the ground suddenly reached a mangled hand out, grasping at Nino’s bare ankle as he walked by. 

The reaction was instantaneous. Nino recoiled from the touch, as if he’d been burned, and screamed in fury. There was a blur of movement and damn, Sho had forgotten just how fast Nino could move, because suddenly the guy was missing his hand. 

There had been lots of blood on the floor, but it was nothing compared to the amount that gushed from the stump like a geyser. It pumped out in waves as the man’s heart beat, and he howled, his body arching up from the floor. Before he could move much more, Nino sliced his cheek open with another angry scream, and Sho could see the flap of his face fall away, revealing teeth smeared in blood. 

But Nino wasn’t done. He stood over the man and stabbed him through the stomach, then the chest several times. The sound coming from the body went from a loud scream to something more like a gurgle from a shower drain as he started to drown in his own blood. Without pausing, Nino severed the man’s other hand, and kicked it away like a soccer ball. It flew across the floor towards the kitchen. He then bent over and stabbed his knife through the man’s left eye. 

Nino immediately turned and sprinted to the shower. Sho heard the water kick on, and then the unmistakable sound of Nino throwing up.

Aside from the whirring of the heaters and the sounds of the shower, the room fell into a heavy, shocked silence. Blood from the body started to seep out in a growing puddle, inching its way closer to where Sho and Jun still sat.

“What the fuck was that?” Jun asked finally. He had been halfway up when the guy had grabbed Nino but at some point he had collapsed back down on his ass, and he was sitting with his back against the wall, his legs sprawled out in front of him. He looked like a scarecrow that had been pushed over by a strong wind, his eyes wide and his face pale. Sho realized it was the first time Jun had ever been scared by anything they’d done within the walls of the warehouse.

“I don’t know,” he said, pulling himself up from the floor, “but it was fucking awesome.” 

Sho walked forward and leaned over the body, taking a closer look. There was no doubt that the guy was dead now. The blood puddle surrounding him was thick, and Sho’s shoes made sucking noises as he walked through the mess. 

He had known Nino could be savage, but he had never seen anything like this. He usually stuck to non-fatal cuts, preferring to let his victims bleed out slowly, torturously even, rather than for them to be eviscerated quickly, but this was another level of intense. The guy’s stomach and chest were covered in deep gauges that had welled up with blood, spilling over like overflowing cups. His wrists ended in masses of red tissue. He had been quite literally hacked apart. 

And the knife… the knife was jammed so far into the man’s eye that Sho was sure it had to have hit the back of his skull. He reached forward and gave the handle an experimental tug, and shivered when the blade didn’t budge. The movement shifted the head from side to side, and a liquid Sho realized had formerly been the man’s eyeball leaked out, slipping down the man’s cheek in a thick line. It looked almost like a tear.

Sho sighed, impressed.

Nino came out of the shower a few seconds later, water dripping from his hair, falling onto the floor in soft pattering drops. He hadn’t toweled off, and he hadn’t gotten dressed yet. His skin was deathly pale and dotted with goosebumps and glistening drops of water, only two bright spots of color burned high on his cheeks. 

Jun hurried forward but Sho was quicker, and he managed to reach out a hand to stop him before he made it halfway to Nino. 

“But, he’ll get sick-” Jun gestured helplessly, and Sho shook his head.

Nino inched forward, taking no notice of them. He came to a stop at the edge of the blood puddle, careful not to let any of it touch his toes. He leaned forward and very neatly spat onto the corpse. With that done, he seemed a little bit more himself, and he looked at Jun and Sho as if just noticing they were still in the room. 

“Nino?” Jun asked, trying to inch forward despite Sho’s hold on him. 

“We’re going to burn this one.” Nino said, his eyes sliding back to the corpse as if he couldn’t keep them away.

Sho shook his head. “That’s going to cause smoke, light, evidence… We can’t risk it.”

“We have to burn it. I need to.”

And, well, Sho had never really been good about denying Nino anything. 

 

 

They threw the parts into two of the smaller tarps and dragged them through the snowy field until they reached the line of trees that signified the start of the woods about a half a mile to the left of warehouse. Sho made them walk another half mile through the crooked, jutting trees before they settled on a place, to be sure that they wouldn’t be spotted from the road.

The dirt was cold but not frozen, and the hole they dug in the soft earth was just deep enough for the dismembered parts and a few logs of wood. It was a haphazard campfire, and Sho looked at it doubtfully before striking a match. His fears were unfounded, the trees had kept the snow off of the ground so the wood was dry, and it caught with a slow crackling that turned into a whoosh of flame. 

The makeshift campfire was easy to create, but sitting around it was harder; the smell of the flesh as it burned was sweet, metallic, meaty. There was smoke, enough that Sho worried it’d get them caught before he realized it was a cloudy night with no visible stars, and it was pitch black above the trees. They could hear the skin popping and charring, turning black and flaking away as the fat dripped off the bones into the dirt. 

They dragged a few logs over and sat around the fire, like three men on a camping trip, as the body melted in front of them. Nino had grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the kitchen before they left, and soon the bottle began making rounds from hand to hand. 

They were quiet. Somehow Sho and Jun both knew this was Nino’s time, he was in control and he would speak and explain himself when he was ready. 

The time came about thirty minutes after they’d lit the fire.

"I let a guy touch me once and he wasn't nice. Now no one touches me."

Neither Jun nor Sho replied, letting the first piece of Nino’s life he chose to reveal to them hang in the air. Sho took another swig out of the bottle. His insides felt pleasantly warm. 

“I get that,” Jun said after several minutes. 

“Huh?” Nino looked like he’d forgotten what they were talking about, despite it being himself who had spoken. 

“I get not wanting anyone else to touch you. I would feel the same if it weren’t for… Well, you know.” He glanced at Sho quickly, then turned away back towards the fire. Sho thought his ears were red, but it could have just been the light from the flames. He grinned to himself anyway. 

“You really get it?” Nino was looking at Jun in a way that was almost heartbreakingly hopeful. That look felt surreally out of place on Nino’s face, and Sho longed to reach out and hug him, but then he remembered the body on the floor back at the warehouse, the knife stuck so far into its skull that he’d had to yank with all his might to pull it out. 

“Yeah, I do,” Jun said with a smile. “My ex, the one who left me in the dumpster, he was an asshole. Our relationship was bad, really bad. I mean, he kicked the shit out of me and then he left me for dead in the middle of nowhere in what he thought was a deserted industrial park so you probably assumed that already.”

Jun reached for the bottle, and Sho let him have it without complaint. Suddenly the focus of their group had shifted from Nino to Jun, and when Sho glanced at Nino he seemed genuinely grateful for it. 

“We lived together for about six years, and he used to hit me until I couldn’t see straight. He’d burn me, push me around, any way you can think of to hurt a person, he did it to me. One time he punched me right in the face so hard that the lens from my glasses shattered and cut my eyelid.” 

Sho pictured Jun, his Jun, being punched in the face, sustaining the injury he was describing, and a rage so complete overwhelmed him that he had to bite down on his tongue hard in order to maintain control over himself. In his mind, Sho was holding Jun’s faceless ex down on the floor, repeatedly bringing a hammer down onto the his face until it resembled blended meat. 

“What did you do?” The sound of Nino’s voice brought Sho away from the nameless prick who had hurt Jun and back to the fire, but only barely.

“I didn’t do anything,” Jun said, and he laughed a short, humorless laugh. “He tried to kill me and then you found me. I did nothing up until the very end.”

It was the shame in Jun’s voice that finally did it, the self hate and shame that was overwhelmingly evident in the man that he loved so much. Sho’s world faded into a whirl of white fury.

 

 

Jun’s wallet, the one that Nino had pulled out of his pocket on that rainy night so many months ago, was still sitting on top of the fridge exactly where they’d left it. Sho snatched it up, and yes, there it was, Jun’s driver’s license, and printed on the license was his old address. Sho turned around, grabbed the mallet from the wall, and was heading back outside right when Jun made it to the front door. 

“What are you doing?” Jun asked, a little out of breath from chasing after Sho once the fire had been put out. 

“I’m gonna kill him.”

“What?”

“Right now. I’m gonna kill him.”

“You can’t.”

Sho ignored him. He threw open the car door and slid inside. He was about to close it when Jun stood in the way, blocking him. He leaned down to look at Sho. “We don’t kill specific people!” Sho picked up his phone and began entering the address into the GPS app. “Are you listening? Sho! We don’t-”

“I’m going, and whether or not you come with me is up to you.”

Nino, who had walked back rather than run as Jun had, finally appeared. Wordlessly, he opened the front passenger door of the car and slid inside. 

“Wha- You, too?”

“Come on, Jun-pon,” Nino said. “You know he has to do it.”

 

 

Jun spent the drive into the city begging Sho to turn around, but Sho didn’t acknowledge him no matter how much he insisted it was a bad idea. 

And later, each time that Jun thought back on what happened after Sho kicked the door down that night, he was again struck by just how quickly everything had gone wrong. 

The door had flown inwards surprisingly easily. Jun wondered if it had even been locked. The inside of the apartment was the same as it had been the last time Jun had seen it, the blanket that Jun’s grandmother had knitted him was even still draped across the back of the ancient couch he and Sota had first purchased when they moved in together. 

The blanket wasn’t the only thing on the couch. Sota had been watching TV, some variety show with the sound turned down low, and he had dozed off. The sound of the door banging open had woken him up, and he stood, lunged for something next to where he had been sitting, and there was the unmistakable sound of a gun cocking. 

Things slowed down a bit in Jun’s memory once they were looking down the barrel of a Glock 19. With Sota standing in front of them, they could all clearly see the uniform of a policeman folded on the living room table behind him. He hadn’t been a policeman when Jun had been with him, and a cold sense of dismay filled him at the sight of the badge sitting on top of his shirt. Jun couldn’t have thought of a worse possible situation to walk into, but fate would shortly prove him wrong. 

When Sota’s eyes fell on Jun, he smiled. “Knew you’d come back to me one day,” he said, “just thought it’d be in hell.”

“Shut the fuck up. You don’t get to talk to him.”

Even after everything that had happened, Jun was even surprised by the contempt in Sho’s voice, and when Sota turned to look at Sho, there was genuine surprise on his face. “Who’s this?”

“You don’t get to talk to me, either.”

Jun felt like he was on a videotape that was being sped up and slowed down. When they had entered the room, things were going lightning fast, but now there was a thick, heavy tension in the air that brought almost everything to a halt. Even breathing was difficult, and he had the sudden, burning need to fill his lungs with as much air as possible with each breath, as if he was on the verge of drowning. 

Jun’s focus had been on the gun, and he had mistakenly believed that they were all in agreement that a gun in the room changed things. Apparently he had misjudged the extent of Sho’s anger, so when Sho lunged forward with a scream and his mallet raised above his head, Jun was unprepared. Instead of getting a handful of Sho’s jacket, Jun’s fingers just grazed the fabric, grasping onto thin air. 

The whole situation seemed like they were acting out a play, or in the middle of a dream. Sota being a cop and having immediate access to a firearm that was now pointed at Sho seemed so utterly insane, so improbable, that Jun felt the ridiculous urge to either laugh or vomit. 

When the gun went off, Jun was still reeling in surprise from the fact that Sho had charged forward despite a gun in his face. He knew what a gunshot sounded like, he knew there was a gun in the room, but he couldn’t connect those two things together to a concrete idea of a gun being fired at the man he was in love with until Sho screamed in pain. 

It was the worst sound Jun had ever heard in his life, but he was frozen in place. Sho doubled over, the arm with his mallet clutched in his hand went from a position poised to strike to falling limp by his side. Jun watched in horror as Sho’s free hand, which had flown to his stomach, came away covered in blood. The sight of the blood was what broke the spell on him. Jun heard someone in the room screaming and he realized it was himself. 

Sho turned at the sound of Jun’s voice and they locked eyes. Jun could feel a wetness on his face and he knew he was crying. Jun took a step forward, but then there were hands on him, holding him back. Nino, restraining him from walking forward. 

Sho turned back around, and despite his obvious pain, used all his strength to swing the mallet hard into the police officer’s body. 

He hadn’t been expecting it. While Sho had been bent forward, Sota had been watching him clutching his stomach in something close to amusement. When the mallet struck his shoulder, there was the unmistakable sound of the bone breaking, and his hand dropped to his side, and he shrieked in mingled pain and surprise. 

The gun had been clutched in his hand, and it slid across the floor, coming to rest near Jun’s feet. Jun shook himself out of Nino’s grasp and picked it up, more out of wanting to keep it out of Sota’s hands than any desire to use it. But then Sho collapsed back onto the floor, and Jun saw for the first time just how damaging the gunshot had been. 

There was an anguished cry that Jun recognized as coming from Nino, then he vaguely registered Nino charging past him. There was the sound of a struggle, but Jun wasn’t paying attention.

Was Sho going to die? The idea seemed absurd. Sho was the strongest, most dependable person he knew. The most honest, the most loving, the smartest person, the most...

Without Nino’s hands at his sides, there was nothing holding him in place anymore, and he made his way to Sho on shaky legs. 

He collapsed down on the floor, not registering the pain in his legs. Nino gave another cry, this time of pain, and Jun turned to see that Sota had knocked him to the ground. Jun raised the gun and squinted through the burning haze of his tears. 

Sota laughed. “You won’t do it, I know you, Jun. You’re a coward. That’s why it was so easy to-” 

Jun’s first shot hit him in the shoulder, and the next two went in his stomach. When he hit the floor, Jun stood, standing over him as he fired the gun repeatedly into what was already a corpse by the fifth shot. He kept shooting until all he got was a dry click of the empty chamber, but didn’t stop pulling the trigger until Nino gently eased the gun from his hand. 

Jun went to Sho then, pulled him close, and began to sob. 

The sounds of sirens was starting to grow in the distance, and Nino tugged on Jun’s sleeve harder, trying to yank him up off the floor. “The cops are coming, Jun, we have to go.”

“No,” Jun said, burying his face against Sho’s neck. The smell of blood hung thick in the air, but this close to Sho, Jun could smell his shampoo and sweat and their laundry detergent. He squeezed his eyes shut, and prayed that when he opened them, they’d be back at home, where the Sho smells belonged, where things had a routine and he fell asleep every night with Sho’s strong body pressed against his, where he felt safe and cared for by the man cradled in his arms. 

Nino was still talking, but Jun wasn’t listening. He heard the rattle in Sho’s chest as he tried to breathe, and Jun pulled him closer, knowing there was blood on his hands and clothes that for the first time, belonged to someone he loved. 

“Jun, come on.” Nino used his full strength to pull Jun up from where he was curled over Sho. “We can try to get him outside with us.”

Jun let himself be led, only using his own strength when it came time to pull Sho up off the floor. There was more blood than he had expected; when Sho stood, more of it seeped out and down his legs, and huge flowers of blood had begun to bloom on Sho’s shirt and pants, inching their way over the fabric like watercolor paint. He took three steps before lurching forward with a groan, nearly stumbling back to the floor. 

“He can’t walk,” Jun said, panic clawing its way through the horror and disbelief that had been thundering through him since the first shot. 

“Can you carry him?” Nino asked, rushing to the window to look outside. “They’re not here yet, but they will be any minute.” He was right, the sirens had been steadily growing in volume. 

Sho was leaning his weight against Jun’s side, and Jun leaned forward to kiss his cheek. “This may hurt,” he said, hating how scared his voice sounded, “but I’m going to have to move you.” 

Being as gentle as he could, Jun got Sho up on his back. Nino opened the door, and they made it down the stairs and into the street fairly quickly. Getting Sho in the car was harder, because somewhere between the apartment and the sidewalk he had fallen unconscious, but with Nino’s help it was manageable. Jun slid in the backseat, careful to keep Sho as close to lying down as possible with his hands pressed against the opening in his stomach, trying to prevent any additional blood loss.

Nino turned the key in the ignition and Sho’s car roared to life, then jerked violently as Nino tried to move forward. Sho groaned, his eyes fluttering open at the movement, and Jun felt blood wash through his fingers, coating the backs of his hands. Jun pushed harder against Sho’s stomach.

There was another lurch, and Nino yelled over his shoulder, “Sorry, I’ve never driven a car before.”

“You what?” 

“This is my first time driving but-” he moved the gear stick into the correct position and the car moved forward with a scream. “I can figure it out.”

Jun pushed away the image of them all running into a brick wall at a hundred miles per hour in favor of lifting Sho’s shirt up to look at the damage. The fabric was heavy, completely soaked through with blood already.

The hole in Sho’s stomach was about the diameter of a pencil. It was a jagged circle, with raised edges. 

 

“Take us to the hospital!”

“Can’t. Not after that.” 

Jun remembered the sizable blood pool Sho had left up in the apartment, feet from the dead cop, and his eyes burned as he started to cry again. 

“We have to! We have to save him!”

“There’s no point.” Nino sighed heavily. “He’s lost too much blood.”

“No,” Jun shook his head. “That’s not true, he’s going to be fine if we just get him somewhere-”

Sho raised a bloody hand and tried to cupped Jun’s face with it, but his hand was too slick and it slipped back down to his chest. His breathing was shallow, coming in tiny gasps that seemed to vibrate through his whole body. “Nino’s right. It’s okay, you’ll be okay,” he said, trying to smile up at him. Sweat had matted his bangs to his face, despite the cold.

“Why won’t you two listen to me? We can… we can just…” Jun’s hands were wet with Sho’s blood, sliding along the skin of his belly as he tried to maintain pressure on the wound. Sho’s eyes slipped closed again, and Jun leaned in to rest his forehead against Sho’s shoulder, his eyes stinging. His face felt itchy from the salt in his tears. 

“It’s okay, Jun,” Sho said quietly, barely more than a whisper. “Can you take me to the park? The one we went to that one time.” He took a rattling breath that made Jun’s heart clench painfully in his chest. “I’d like to go back there.”

Jun sniffed hard, removing one of his hands from Sho’s stomach to wipe his nose with his sleeve. He felt the wet swipe of Sho’s blood on his cheek, joining the rest of the mess already there, and didn’t wipe it away. He wormed his hand back under Sho’s shirt. “Nino,” he said, trying to talk through the choked sobs that were being drawn out of him like hiccups. “Nino, can you take us to the park on 5th?”

Nino didn’t say anything, but he made an abrupt right turn, and Jun settled back into his seat, moving closer to Sho. 

When they made it to the park a few minutes later, Sho was still with them but he was fading fast. His breaths were coming slower, and he was making that same gasping rattle with each one. Jun had given up sitting normally in the seat and had drawn Sho close to him so he was almost in Jun’s lap, his back against the door. Jun was cradling him in his arms like a baby, trying to keep his hands on the bullet wound. There was blood everywhere, and Sho’s face had turned a horrifying shade of grey. 

With Nino’s help, he got Sho out of the car once they’d come to a stop. They tried to be gentle but Sho was still moaning lowly in pain. Nino had parked on the street, which was closer to the actual benches than the parking lot, but Jun barely had time to be thankful for the shorter walk before the thought was lost among the whirlwind of dream-like haze, panic, and grief circling in Jun’s mind.

At first Sho wanted to walk, but when he nearly collapsed after a few steps, Jun picked him up in his arms. He carried him with hardly any trouble; Sho felt suddenly like he weighed considerably less than normal, and Jun tried not to think about the fact that it was because he’d lost so much blood. 

Jun set Sho down on the nearest bench gently, which was luckily one of the few that had been cleared of snow. The park didn’t get as much use in winter, and most of the benches were lost under piles of white. 

Sho was on the verge of unconsciousness. His head lolled to one side, and when Jun sat next to him and wrapped his arms around his shoulders, he opened his eyes weakly. 

“Jun,” he said, and he smiled. The smile was abruptly shattered by a cough, and blood sprayed from his mouth. “Jun, we made it.”

“Yeah,” Jun said, his voice wavering. He wiped the blood from Sho’s bottom lip with his thumb. “We got you back to the park like you wanted.”

“Thank you.” He turned his head to look at the snow-covered trees. “You were right, it’s so beautiful here. Remember when we came here the first time?”

Jun’s vision was blurring. “Of course, you still hated me then.”

Sho laughed before coughing again. “No,” another gasping breath, “I loved you already. Even then.” Blood dripped from his mouth down onto his chin, and Jun wiped it away. Sho fell quiet for a long time, his eyes fixed on the trees and his slow blinking and occasional breathing the only signs he was still alive. Jun was shocked to see Nino take Sho’s hand from his lap, gripping it tightly in his own. 

“I’m cold,” Sho said, so quiet that Jun almost missed it. “It’s almost time.”

“No.” Jun hurriedly took his coat off, snapping one of the buttons off and sending it flying into the bushes in his haste. He got it around Sho’s shoulders, but with his own coat already on, it didn’t cover him much. “You can’t leave me yet. You can’t.” He brushed his lips against Sho’s mouth in a kiss, tasting Sho’s blood when he moved away.

“Jun…” Sho said, staring off into the trees, “and Nino…” Nino squeezed his hand, and Jun was about to tell him not to hurt him, but realized the futility of that before it could leave his lips. “I love you… both of you. You-” another breath, this time slower, and Sho groaned quietly in pain, “you will never know how much.”

“I love you,” Jun said, pressing his forehead against Sho’s own. He was shaking without his coat, but he didn’t feel cold. “I love you, I love you.”

Nino sniffed, and Jun knew he was crying. Sho took one final breath, one that seemed to take tremendous effort. He gave Nino’s hand one last squeeze, turned to look at Jun, tilting his head sideways so it came to rest against Jun’s shoulder. Then he closed his eyes, releasing his breath in a sigh. 

Jun sobbed as Sho’s chest stilled, his voice echoing among the trees. 

Sho was gone.

 

 

Three days later, Jun was strolling through the aisles of a convenience store in Nagoya when he saw Sho's face on the front page of a newspaper. He picked it up from the stand and was reading the headlines when Nino appeared from behind the shelves separating the aisles. He glanced over Jun’s shoulder, then frowned. 

"Why are you reading that? You know they pinned everything on him. You're just going to hurt yourself if you keep reading these things."

"Yeah, but this is the first one with a picture." Jun pointed to the photograph of Sho next to the text. It was in black and white, and was in the poorly printed style of most newspapers, but it was Sho, smiling at them from the page. Jun grinned back at him. "It must have been his photo for the university. Look, he's in a suit. Such a nerd." 

Nino rolled his eyes when Jun threw the newspaper down on the counter at the register, but he paid for it regardless. When they returned back to the hotel room they'd been staying in, Jun carefully cut the photo out of the newspaper with a pair of scissors he'd packed in their luggage. Nino scoffed at him, but when Jun came out of the bath an hour later, he saw Nino had removed one of the framed photos on the wall of the room and had replaced the picture inside with the one of Sho. It was propped up on the nightstand between their two beds, and Jun found himself tearing up, overwhelmed with emotion when he saw it. 

Nino held him as he cried, his skin warm and comforting against Jun’s own. 

 

 

 

\-- Epilogue --

 

He woke up to twin shadows standing over him. Only that wasn’t right, the shadows weren’t quite twins. One was taller, had longer hair, the other was slightly hunched, in bigger clothes. But they were twins in other ways, hoods up, faces hidden, each clutching hammers in gloved fists. 

“You know what I love about guys like you?” the taller asked. The shadow’s voice was nasally, cold. 

He opened his mouth to reply, but couldn’t get a single word out before the taller figure brought the hammer down against his jaw.

“You’re so easy to find. You made this easy for us.”

He wanted to ask what the shape was talking about, but he couldn’t because of the pain.

The second hit came from the smaller man, and this time his collarbone gave way with a snap.

The pain overwhelmed him, a wave of pain, a crushing weight of pain, a horrible wall of pain.

After the sixth hit the smaller man was panting, whispered, “Men who do things like what you did to me don’t deserve to live when he has to be dead.” 

If he had heard the venom in that one sentence, he might have recognized the voice behind the hood, might have realized what was happening to him. But he didn’t hear it. He was gone already, which was a relief for everyone.


End file.
